The nice thing about an early Thanksgiving is that it gives us a bit of a grace period between Thanksgiving and the Christmas season. December doesn’t start until next Saturday, and Advent begins next Sunday. That makes this a relatively quiet week, holiday-wise, so there’s a chance to recover between holidays.

Which is good because this is going to be a busy week for me. I’m speaking to a university writing class tomorrow, I have a pretty intense choir night Wednesday, and I’m wrapping up a book. The book isn’t on a real deadline, as it’s mostly a personal project, but I figure that since it’s National Novel Writing Month, I might as well go with it, even though I didn’t start until halfway through the month. I’m a cinch to get to the NaNoWriMo 50,000 words, but I suspect I’ll end up going beyond that to get the whole story in, and I don’t know if I’ll get all that done by the end of the month.

Then I’ll have written two rough drafts in two months. Whew! December will be devoted to revising rough draft #1, which is due in January. I may work on something else for fun the rest of the month. Then January will be for revising rough draft #2 and proofreading draft #1. After that, it’s Rebels #4.

I think I’m going to keep up my current work schedule on most days in December, but when there’s the option for a fun holiday event or activity, I’ll let myself take time off for it. For instance, the classical radio station is doing a week of live lunchtime concerts downtown, and I plan to hit at least one of them. On nice evenings, I’m going to try to take a twilight walk to look at Christmas lights (the extra exercise will be good for me). There will be at least one shopping day, maybe a weekday trip or two to the nice malls.

I had a good Thanksgiving, and I even managed to get in at least a minimum word count while I was out of town, which I generally haven’t been able to do. I usually really slack off in writing time in December, so we’ll see if I can maintain some kind of consistency and also enjoy the holidays. Not having cable will help, since I won’t be able to spend all my evenings watching cheesy Christmas movies.